Good article.

"The Finnish group has dabbled with Linux since 2005, using it in "Internet tablets" -- sleek phone-like devices used to access the Web that have failed to gain mass-market appeal in part due to their lack of a cellular radio."

Good thing the same mistake is not to be repeated

Serbia will catch up eventually; just a bit slower than most of Europe I found there were tons of open WiFi APs as well.

It is called Vodafone Zorgeloos Online here ('without worries online'), and the FUP means that you're not allowed to use 10x as much as the average person. But I know cable corporations here who apply the same. In its essence it is fair 99% of the customers do not pay extra for 1% of the heavy users. But the secrecy surrounding it I don't like. IM is allowed as it seems (also read earlier quote). Not being allowed X can be circumvented with VPN (except this increaes latency), and I'd like to see such tried in court. I don't think it will hold any legal bearing. Look at Apple pooping its pampers for FCC saying they're still 'reviewing' Google Voice. The argument against Skype is that is uses a lot of P2P data traffic. If that is true, I can follow the reasoning. It means a Skype user is not giving the mobile telco any direct profit while DoSing the rest of the users. That is not the behaviour you want on your network.

IMO the secrecy and disallowing certain services should be made illegal by law, while customers pay more precisely what they pay for/use without worrying.

Remember back in the days how expensive always-on leased lines were. If you had some kind of all-you-can-eat subscription your employer pays for then they cut a deal for X subscriptions. They certainly pay for the data you use one way or another. Perhaps they apply the 10x as much as average to the rest of corporate users of the deal. So if your colleagues burn tons of GB as well you can be sure they will calculate that in the lunch. TANSTAAFL 101.

I get max HSDPA with my E71 as well, but I still have a FUP. Here you can get all-you-can-eat subscriptions with lower max speed. You can also get strict MB bundles. T-Mobile even has web'n'walk with good speed until you get over 1 GB or sth after which you get heavily capped. Or you can buy an iPhone (or corporate bundle) with a so-called unlimited usage. But you pay a lot for that subscription every month; there the limit is your wallet. There is always a catch, a limit, somewhere!

A compare with 56k6 goes moot because those weren't flat-free and had different speed. Dial-up is more akin to how cellphones usage was a few years ago: low speed, non-flat free, for things like WAP.

What we have mostly (with countries such as Serbia still catching up to this trend) is an always-on, national covered network which you can use for certain ordinary tasks most people do on the Internet (e-mail, news, social networking, IM, maps, youtube) with exception of heavy bandwidth things like downloading a DVD or latency related things like FPS game. I say national because for it to be usable international the prices are too high.

Well, I am not sure if it was a mistake (including a cellular radio) or a conscious decision. Else, they had 3 full years (since 2005) to realize it and introduce one cellular radio either in N800 or N810. Nokia seems to know what it is doing!

Updated with forum member additions...

N900 recap - what we "know" - please add or correct as appropriate.

Specifications:

Dimensions: 111mm x 59.7mm x 18mm
Screen: 3.5" 800x480 resistive touch, proximity sensor, accelerometer?
CPU: OMAP 3 600Mhz–1Ghz
RAM: 256MB (+750MB virtual)
Storage: 32GB internal (+microSD)
Battery: 1320 mAh
OS: Maemo 5
Camera: 5MP Carl Zeiss dual LED - video capture at VGA 30fps minimum (based on N97 performance)
Browser: Fennec?
Flash/Java: full support
Communications: 3G, HSPA, WiFi, Bluetooth, A-GPS, FM radio/transmitter
Connections: Mini(?) USB (for power and data), 3.5mm audio/video out
Format support: Extensive - MPEG2, DIvX, etc.

Applications:

Maemo community apps - how many? which good ones? backwards compatibility with Maemo 4 apps?
Nokia(?) Maps
Nokia PIM apps
Nokia Media Player
E-mail - Nokia app? Nokia mail for exchange?
Nokia camera app
Nokia profile and phone settings apps
more confirmed or expected apps?

Trust me. I tried bigger models (like the Xperia X1), I just cannot handle them. (Also the touch-screen makes me go nuts. I need keys.)

And I'm not going to make any compromise only because marketing droids and bored tech journalists want to make us buy bricks instead of mobiles.

I beg to differ here.. if they did know what they were doing, they wouldn't have let their marketshare slid down that far.

Probably they waited for a killer device like N900 to bring their market share back. And it took them this long. Btw, wouldn't you agree, it's worth the wait for them?

Ahem.. dear to share source of your info about this 'VGA 30fps' part? I was searching this info for a loong time. Until now I only saw HD camera in specs.

The N900 browser screenshots that Eldar posted don't match the Fennec Beta or does that just mean that Nokia are using the Fennec browser with their own custom skin?

Well it seems better than what the previous models in their high end line up are (not really best selling model in that categories compared to their competitors), or compared to the previous NIT (technologically inferior, dated).

And frankly... we're rght in the middle of a product launch hype. So, the honeymoon hasn't even begun